In the years leading up to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and for just over a decade thereafter, a particularly large number of Jews emigrated from the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet countries. The majority of these emigrants made Aliyah to Israel, while a sizable number immigrated to various countries in the Western world. This wave of Jewish migration followed the 1970s Soviet aliyah, which began after the Soviet government gave special permission to the country's Jewish refuseniks to emigrate.